Spring 2006

Engineering and Technology in the Service of Freedom: Becoming the Next “Greatest Generation”

Good Afternoon, and welcome, Class of 2006 to your future.

It is a great privilege to speak to you on such an important day in your lives.  When Dean Farvardin first asked me to speak with you this morning, I began thinking about you, the coming years, and what the future might look like.  A recent book, Tom Brokaw’s “The Greatest Generation”, caught my eye.  In this best selling work,  the former NBC anchor recounts the many heroic actions of the World War II generation in a series of vignettes, stories about so-called “ordinary Americans” to whom the country turned in a time of crisis.  Those ordinary people –my parents and your grandparents—saved Democracy as we know it and made it possible for us to sit here even today.  We can never thank the 16 Million Americans who served, and the half million who died, in that war enough for their selflessness.  I suspect there are still a few of them in the audience here today, and they deserve our gratitude and our applause.

But it is not my intention today to talk about the past, but rather to challenge you – the Maryland Engineers of 2006 – to become the backbone of the next “Great Generation” in our country.  If you succeed, future generations will hail you as Engineers in the Service of Freedom.

What makes a Great Generation?   To be great, according to Brokaw, requires opportunity, service, sacrifice, and selflessness, and I want to talk briefly about each of these factors in the few minutes I have with you today.

Who can doubt the opportunity?  I believe that we are living in an age of extraordinary circumstances, and you are - by virtue of your talent, education and aspiration - about to be part of the greatest technological transformation the world has ever seen.

Sixty years after World War II, we are totally dependent upon technology.  My generation gave birth to the age of information, made possible through remarkable breakthroughs.  We were pretty successful, maybe too successful, as the world now has an expectation that technology can solve just about every problem.  And when one looks at the record of just the recent past, it is easy to understand why this expectation exists:

• We have sequenced the human genome, opening up the opportunity to cure disease, recreate limbs and organs, and make extraordinary break-throughs in medical science.  Indeed, the convergence of information technology, biotechnology and nanotechnology is the hope for the future in medicine.  Reinventing medicine --- it’s all in the code.
• We navigate by GPS and no longer need paper maps or directions.  Cars are being programmed to be able to detect unsafe driving behaviors and automatically adjust on behalf of the drivers.  Commercial airplanes take off, fly, and land safely with minimal interaction from pilots.  Voice recognition systems no longer need to be trained and can detect voices and accents with near perfect accuracy.
• We communicate across continents as quickly and easily as we speak across the room to one another.  The world is globally connected and much of the world’s body of knowledge has been digitized and is as close as the browser on your PDA or cell phone.
• We will support our national defense in the future with fighter aircraft that will be more than jets – they will be highly integrated air systems that will have superb situational awareness, and reduced vulnerability that will make them harder to find, harder to hit and even harder to kill.

We have come to the point where we look to technology for news and entertainment, for educating our children, and managing our finances.  We expect to find technology solutions that will protect us from our enemies, that will eradicate hunger and suffering, save the environment, make us more competitive, more energy independent and … someday… help us bring peace to our world.  Instead of standing in awe of technology, we now demand and depend upon it for everything we do.

Oh, by the way, everyone will expect YOU to find solutions to these problems more quickly in the future than in the past.  In the world of IT that I inhabit, we have come to expect technology to become outdated every six months.  Moore’s law continues to hold true and the speed of computers is doubling at an astonishing rate.  Time may be your greatest challenge as you attempt to grasp the massive opportunity that presents itself.

In fact, I envision a future:

• Where new technology development involves work in a nano-scale environment.  Electronic circuits will be built from a number of individual molecular components and nanometer-scale wires.  The circuits will, of course, be self-assembling and far more powerful than silicon circuits and will cost practically nothing.
• Where computers operate by light waves rather than electricity.  This will permit thousands of channels of information instead of the hundreds today.  You will, therefore, have an unlimited amount of data at your fingertips, delivered at the speed of light.
• Where machines will provide intelligent conversation.  Talking to the wall won’t seem strange at all.  With microphones embedded in structures – in walls or on your wrist, you will find the answers to your questions.

So, ladies and gentlemen, the opportunity for greatness, in the form of great problems to be solved and great technology with which to solve them will not be lacking.  Indeed, the opportunity will be overwhelming.

But you will not become a great generation by opportunity and technology alone.  The greatness will come in how well you meet the challenges implied by the other three factors – the three S’s – service, sacrifice and selflessness.

In my business, the IT business, all major companies have access to the same technology.  What distinguishes the great companies, and I modestly think Lockheed Martin is one, is how well people understand the needs of their customers and can provide solutions to problems, not just gadgets or systems.  We never tell a customer NO when he or she asks for a solution to a problem.  In the future, a solutions orientation for engineers will be even more important as resources become scarcer and the problems harder.

It will also be critical that these solutions be “citizen-centric”.  By this I mean simply that technology must enable our people to be both served better by our government, and for our people to be better citizens.  Advances in health care technology, for example, should not simply enable the extension of life, but also improve the quality of that life.  Advances in communications should not simply enable people to know more, but also to participate more, in the decisions that affect them.  Engineers and technologists cannot force people to be better citizens, but we can enable them if they desire.

With regard to sacrifice, none of us hopes to repeat the experience of World War II, but we all know that this world is still a dangerous place for freedom and democracy.  The Manhattan Project of World War II was probably the preeminent example of science in the service of freedom, and its lessons will serve all of you well.  Some of you will be called to devote your professional lives in public service to the cause of freedom.  You will do it without regard to personal wealth or fame, but because it is the right thing to do.  You will also do it with a devotion to honesty and ethics that will make your families and your nation proud.  And, occasionally, you will, if you are honest and ethical, question the authority that gives you the orders, if you are to develop technology that is truly in the service of humanity.

For most of you, however, the call to sacrifice and greatness will not be directly in the public service.  For you, sacrifice will be in the form of deferred gratification and hard work.  Much has been made in the popular press of the lack of a work ethic in young people today.  I don’t believe it.  Rather, I believe it is our generation’s responsibility to lead you toward a practical and idealistic vision for technology in our society that enables cynicism to be left behind.  You will work hard if the ends are justified, not just because someone tells you to do it.

And that leads me to the final criteria for greatness – selflessness.  Your grandparents fought for the nation, but, if the accounts are true, they fought the hardest for their “brothers in battle”.  They had a strong sense that they were all in the fight together, both with those in the trenches, and for their families at home.  As engineers, as citizens, your quest to develop and implement technology must also have a strong sense of this selflessness.  Technology must be seen to benefit all people, to make our society more just, and more free.  Technology must be seen as enhancing our sense of community, and not driving us farther apart.  All our work in homeland security technology, for example, must reinforce the sense of togetherness we felt right after September 11, not drive us into our own separate foxholes.

If you can marry the technological opportunities with these “softer” values of service, sacrifice, and selflessness, you will not only be the next “Great Generation, you will accomplish one further purpose as well.  You will become an example to others and you will attract even more young people to your profession.  The scarcity of scientists and engineers in our society is becoming increasingly well known.  My company, Lockheed Martin, will hire over 14,000 engineers this year.  In three years, we will need nearly 44,000 new hires as our people increasingly retire.  US colleges and universities are only producing 62,000 new engineers every year – so there is a gigantic looming shortfall in the United States, a shortfall that cannot continue if we are to compete with the rest of the world, and especially Asia and the Pacific, over the coming decades.  There are things that public policy can do to address this shortfall, like providing the right kinds of financial incentives for smart people to pursue engineering.  But I believe that the strongest force for encouraging more engineers will be your generation’s demonstrated performance in modeling how engineering can be pursued in the service of freedom.

So, what will we see in 2056, what will the United States have grown to become?  In your careers, each of you will encounter greater diversity, greater technology and even greater and more rapid change than in the past.  You will have marvelous opportunities to serve, to sacrifice, to be selfless as you use your skills in the most ethical fashion to better the world in which you live.  The future is bright, and you represent the best and the brightest.  It is my hope, as I look on the faces of the proud men and women here today, that you will stand up to the challenges our country presents, and when we look back in 50 years, you will indeed be viewed as an even “Greater Generation.”

Thank you, and congratulations to the Class of 2006.

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